In numerous areas from Vaccine Safety to Climate Change to Neoclassical Economics, dissenters argue that the scientific literature proves the majority view is wrong, that the scientific literature actually implies very different conclusions than those normally believed and taught. Moreover, numerous historic examples are known even within the hard sciences and away from policy questions, where the substantial majority of scientific opinion was confused for a period about what the actual import of the scientific literature was, as dissenters of the day already understood. Whether the dissenters turn out to be right or wrong in the current set of controversies, it is unfortunate that the literature is in a state where what is known, is so little transparently resolved. How is one to judge who is right, save by reading and understanding the literature myself, a time consuming and error prone process requiring sophisticated training?
Any serious scientific literature contains hundreds or thousands or more published papers. Determining what the logical import of all those papers might be pertaining to a question such as: “Should we expect the world to warm 2 degrees Celsius in the next decades?” is a problem for which there is currently no good solution. One method society uses to deal with problems like this is appointing expert panels like the International Panel on Climate Change, but such panels are expensive to run and may be subject to group think and/or political influence, and in any case clearly have not inspired universal confidence in the results of their pronouncements.
Moreover, there is a substantial literature indicating that such problems may be caused or exacerbated by underappreciated aspects of human group psychology. For example, in The Crowd, an 1895 book that greatly influenced world leaders in the 20th century, Gustav Le Bon pointed out that what he called a “psychological crowd” would often form, in which the individuals comprising it would lose much of their rationality, deferring to others' judgment in the crowd, and jump from image to image in constructing arguments without properly checking whether one step logically follows from the other. Isolated individuals may exist in the crowd who perceive the flaws in the crowd's reasoning, but they may often be unable to make their voices heard by the majority that assumes the crowd is right.
Therefore, there exists a need to address phenomena like those Le Bon described which have afflicted society quite broadly.